Whether as the mothers of the Norse God Heimdall, Morgan and her sisters on Avalon, the nine sisters on the heart of the founding myth of the Gikuyu of Kenya, or witches battling with the Irish St Patrick, stories of nine women, steadily attending a goddess or linked to a heroic or divine male, exist across much of our world. Triggered by a local story still told in his native Dundee, Stuart McHardy has traced what appears to be memories of groups of nine women, perhaps some roughly priestesses, across much of Europe and so far as Siberia, Korea, India and Africa. Whether as Pictish saints, Muses, Valkyries, Druidesses or witches, the tales of those groups of nine women go beyond a vast range of cultural and linguistic boundaries. The painting of nine women dancing round a priapic male in a Catalonian cave painting over fifteen thousand years old suggests these groups might well have been some of the oldest cultural institutions humanity has known.
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